Wally Schumann

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As anyone who knows anyone who has driven this stretch of highway in the last few years know, it’s a very challenging section of highway in the Northwest Territories; probably one of the most challenging. Due to the permafrost degradation and stuff that’s happening out there and the melting and disturbances that are happening on that section of highway, the department had to reach out to the federal government a number of years ago to get some research dollars to have a look at this and develop a program and have test sections on this highway. I think we have four...

The P3 concept is probably a little more challenging one. I commit to the Member that we could sit down with Finance and figure out a way moving forward, but as all Members know in this House, with federal treasury money, there’s a different set of rules on procurement around that and we’re going to have to probably sit down not with just myself and the Finance Minister but with the federal government if there’s a way forward to implement this into a possibility with P3 projects.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As all Members know, we are mandated in the 18th Legislative Assembly to do this. We spoke about this in the House before. This is something that is very important to me, as I came from the manufacturing sector. The department is doing a bunch of preliminary work on how we are going to bring this strategy forward, and when the time comes, I will inform the House when the strategy will be implemented. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I have announced earlier in the House, during this session, all the tourism programs that we have. We have the regional development workshops that we have had in different regions. We just recently had one in the Deh Cho, which pulled a bunch of stakeholders together from the Members’ riding. It was well attended by all Aboriginal governments and groups from the region. We do have an economic development person in every region, to help facilitate tourism. We can sit down and have a look at how we are going to do that. There are a number of different opportunities, different pots of money from...

I thank the Member for this question because as the proposed Revolving Fund moving forward this would allow us the opportunity under that to have this type of decision come forward and have the airport open 24 hours.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Minister, I am not well aware that they have an application in to develop that tourism camp. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At present, the Yellowknife terminal is actually closed for 90 minutes each night, approximately from 2:00 to 3:30 a.m. in the morning, if there are no scheduled flights arriving late or anything departing too early. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As I said, this is early days on this. We are going to draft some stuff and have a look at other jurisdictions, how things are conducted around minerals in other jurisdictions in Canada. We will be seeking input, as I have said, from a number of people and stakeholders in the Northwest Territories, and we are open to any suggestions and stuff as we move forward.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is looking at a number of things under the Mineral Resource Act moving forward: acquiring mineral rights, ministry and royalties, those sorts of things. We have no intention of regulating mining activities under the proposed MRA. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As I’ve said, we’ve worked with Transport Canada to leverage the dollars to monitor and assess the performance of this road with the conditions that we’re presently under. Like I said, with climate change, it makes it very difficult to keep up with the maintenance of it, especially with the lack of capital dollars that we have available to us to do this; but we will continue to do our research and monitoring this road and try to come up with new rehabilitative techniques on how we’re going to address this problem moving forward. I can keep Members informed on some of those test results from...